NEWS revision 104834
1-*- text -*- 2 3Changes in 2.13: 4 5Support for the Fujitsu FRV architecture added by Red Hat. Models for FR400 and 6FR500 included. 7 8Support for DLX processor added. 9 10GASP has now been deprecated and will be removed in a future release. Use the 11macro facilities in GAS instead. 12 13GASP now correctly parses floating point numbers. Unless the base is explicitly 14specified, they are interpreted as decimal numbers regardless of the currently 15specified base. 16 17Changes in 2.12: 18 19Support for Don Knuth's MMIX, by Hans-Peter Nilsson. 20 21Support for the OpenRISC 32-bit embedded processor by OpenCores. 22 23The ARM assembler now accepts -march=..., -mcpu=... and -mfpu=... for 24specifying the target instruction set. The old method of specifying the 25target processor has been deprecated, but is still accepted for 26compatibility. 27 28Support for the VFP floating-point instruction set has been added to 29the ARM assembler. 30 31New psuedo op: .incbin to include a set of binary data at a given point 32in the assembly. Contributed by Anders Norlander. 33 34The MIPS assembler now accepts -march/-mtune. -mcpu has been deprecated 35but still works for compatability. 36 37The MIPS assembler no longer issues a warning by default when it 38generates a nop instruction from a macro. The new command line option 39-n will turn on the warning. 40 41Changes in 2.11: 42 43x86 gas now supports the full Pentium4 instruction set. 44 45Support for AMD x86-64 architecture, by Jan Hubicka, SuSE Labs. 46 47Support for Motorola 68HC11 and 68HC12. 48 49Support for Texas Instruments TMS320C54x (tic54x). 50 51Support for IA-64. 52 53Support for i860, by Jason Eckhardt. 54 55Support for CRIS (Axis Communications ETRAX series). 56 57x86 gas has a new .arch pseudo op to specify the target CPU architecture. 58 59x86 gas -q command line option quietens warnings about register size changes 60due to suffix, indirect jmp/call without `*', stand-alone prefixes, and 61translating various deprecated floating point instructions. 62 63Changes in 2.10: 64 65Support for the ARM msr instruction was changed to only allow an immediate 66operand when altering the flags field. 67 68Support for ATMEL AVR. 69 70Support for IBM 370 ELF. Somewhat experimental. 71 72Support for numbers with suffixes. 73 74Added support for breaking to the end of repeat loops. 75 76Added support for parallel instruction syntax (DOUBLEBAR_PARALLEL). 77 78New .elseif pseudo-op added. 79 80New --fatal-warnings option. 81 82picoJava architecture support added. 83 84Motorola MCore 210 processor support added. 85 86A new pseudo-op .intel_syntax has been implemented to allow gas to parse i386 87assembly programs with intel syntax. 88 89New pseudo-ops .func,.endfunc to aid in debugging user-written assembler code. 90 91Added -gdwarf2 option to generate DWARF 2 debugging information. 92 93Full 16-bit mode support for i386. 94 95Greatly improved instruction operand checking for i386. This change will 96produce errors or warnings on incorrect assembly code that previous versions of 97gas accepted. If you get unexpected messages from code that worked with older 98versions of gas, please double check the code before reporting a bug. 99 100Weak symbol support added for COFF targets. 101 102Mitsubishi D30V support added. 103 104Texas Instruments c80 (tms320c80) support added. 105 106i960 ELF support added. 107 108ARM ELF support added. 109 110Changes in 2.9: 111 112Texas Instruments c30 (tms320c30) support added. 113 114The assembler now optimizes the exception frame information generated by egcs 115and gcc 2.8. The new --traditional-format option disables this optimization. 116 117Added --gstabs option to generate stabs debugging information. 118 119The -a option takes a new suboption, m (e.g., -alm) to expand macros in a 120listing. 121 122Added -MD option to print dependencies. 123 124Changes in 2.8: 125 126BeOS support added. 127 128MIPS16 support added. 129 130Motorola ColdFire 5200 support added (configure for m68k and use -m5200). 131 132Alpha/VMS support added. 133 134m68k options --base-size-default-16, --base-size-default-32, 135--disp-size-default-16, and --disp-size-default-32 added. 136 137The alignment directives now take an optional third argument, which is the 138maximum number of bytes to skip. If doing the alignment would require skipping 139more than the given number of bytes, the alignment is not done at all. 140 141The ELF assembler has a new pseudo-op, .symver, used for symbol versioning. 142 143The -a option takes a new suboption, c (e.g., -alc), to skip false conditionals 144in listings. 145 146Added new pseudo-op, .equiv; it's like .equ, except that it is an error if the 147symbol is already defined. 148 149Changes in 2.7: 150 151The PowerPC assembler now allows the use of symbolic register names (r0, etc.) 152if -mregnames is used. Symbolic names preceded by a '%' (%r0, etc.) can be 153used any time. PowerPC 860 move to/from SPR instructions have been added. 154 155Alpha Linux (ELF) support added. 156 157PowerPC ELF support added. 158 159m68k Linux (ELF) support added. 160 161i960 Hx/Jx support added. 162 163i386/PowerPC gnu-win32 support added. 164 165SCO ELF support added. For OpenServer 5 targets (i386-unknown-sco3.2v5) the 166default is to build COFF-only support. To get a set of tools that generate ELF 167(they'll understand both COFF and ELF), you must configure with 168target=i386-unknown-sco3.2v5elf. 169 170m88k-motorola-sysv3* support added. 171 172Changes in 2.6: 173 174Gas now directly supports macros, without requiring GASP. 175 176Gas now has an MRI assembler compatibility mode. Use -M or --mri to select MRI 177mode. The pseudo-op ``.mri 1'' will switch into the MRI mode until the ``.mri 1780'' is seen; this can be convenient for inline assembler code. 179 180Added --defsym SYM=VALUE option. 181 182Added -mips4 support to MIPS assembler. 183 184Added PIC support to Solaris and SPARC SunOS 4 assembler. 185 186Changes in 2.4: 187 188Converted this directory to use an autoconf-generated configure script. 189 190ARM support, from Richard Earnshaw. 191 192Updated VMS support, from Pat Rankin, including considerably improved debugging 193support. 194 195Support for the control registers in the 68060. 196 197Handles (ignores) a new directive ".this_GCC_requires_the_GNU_assembler", to 198provide for possible future gcc changes, for targets where gas provides some 199features not available in the native assembler. If the native assembler is 200used, it should become obvious pretty quickly what the problem is. 201 202Usage message is available with "--help". 203 204The GNU Assembler Preprocessor (gasp) is included. (Actually, it was in 2.3 205also, but didn't get into the NEWS file.) 206 207Weak symbol support for a.out. 208 209A bug in the listing code which could cause an infinite loop has been fixed. 210Bugs in listings when generating a COFF object file have also been fixed. 211 212Initial i386-svr4 PIC implementation from Eric Youngdale, based on code by Paul 213Kranenburg. 214 215Improved Alpha support. Immediate constants can have a much larger range now. 216Support for the 21164 has been contributed by Digital. 217 218Updated ns32k (pc532-mach, netbsd532) support from Ian Dall. 219 220Changes in 2.3: 221 222Mach i386 support, by David Mackenzie and Ken Raeburn. 223 224RS/6000 and PowerPC support by Ian Taylor. 225 226VMS command scripts (make-gas.com, config-gas.com) have been worked on a bit, 227based on mail received from various people. The `-h#' option should work again 228too. 229 230HP-PA work, by Jeff Law. Note, for the PA, gas-2.3 has been designed to work 231with gdb-4.12 and gcc-2.6. As gcc-2.6 has not been released yet, a special 232version of gcc-2.5.8 has been patched to work with gas-2.3. You can retrieve 233this special version of gcc-2.5.8 via anonymous ftp from jaguar.cs.utah.edu 234in the "dist" directory. 235 236Vax support in gas fixed for BSD, so it builds and seems to run a couple simple 237tests okay. I haven't put it through extensive testing. (GNU make is 238currently required for BSD 4.3 builds.) 239 240Support for the DEC Alpha, running OSF/1 (ECOFF format). The gas support is 241based on code donated by CMU, which used an a.out-based format. I'm afraid the 242alpha-a.out support is pretty badly mangled, and much of it removed; making it 243work will require rewriting it as BFD support for the format anyways. 244 245Irix 5 support. 246 247The test suites have been fixed up a bit, so that they should work with a 248couple different versions of expect and dejagnu. 249 250Symbols' values are now handled internally as expressions, permitting more 251flexibility in evaluating them in some cases. Some details of relocation 252handling have also changed, and simple constant pool management has been added, 253to make the Alpha port easier. 254 255New option "--statistics" for printing out program run times. This is intended 256to be used with the gcc "-Q" option, which prints out times spent in various 257phases of compilation. (You should be able to get all of them printed out with 258"gcc -Q -Wa,--statistics", I think.) 259 260---------------------------------------------------------------- 261 262Changes in 2.2: 263 264RS/6000 AIX and MIPS SGI Irix 5 support has been added. 265 266Configurations that are still in development (and therefore are convenient to 267have listed in configure.in) still get rejected without a minor change to 268gas/Makefile.in, so people not doing development work shouldn't get the 269impression that support for such configurations is actually believed to be 270reliable. 271 272The program name (usually "as") is printed when a fatal error message is 273displayed. This should prevent some confusion about the source of occasional 274messages about "internal errors". 275 276ELF support is falling into place. Support for the 386 should be working. 277Support for SPARC Solaris is in. HPPA support from Utah is being integrated. 278 279Symbol values are maintained as expressions instead of being immediately boiled 280down to add-symbol, sub-symbol, and constant. This permits slightly more 281complex calculations involving symbols whose values are not alreadey known. 282 283DBX-style debugging info ("stabs") is now supported for COFF formats. 284If any stabs directives are seen in the source, GAS will create two new 285sections: a ".stab" and a ".stabstr" section. The format of the .stab 286section is nearly identical to the a.out symbol format, and .stabstr is 287its string table. For this to be useful, you must have configured GCC 288to generate stabs (by defining DBX_DEBUGGING_INFO), and must have a GDB 289that can use the stab sections (4.11 or later). 290 291LynxOS, on i386 and m68k platforms, is now supported. SPARC LynxOS 292support is in progress. 293 294---------------------------------------------------------------- 295 296Changes in 2.1: 297 298Several small fixes for i386-aix (PS/2) support from Minh Tran-Le have been 299incorporated, but not well tested yet. 300 301Altered the opcode table split for m68k; it should require less VM to compile 302with gcc now. 303 304Some minor adjustments to add (Convergent Technologies') Miniframe support, 305suggested by Ronald Cole. 306 307HPPA support (running OSF only, not HPUX) has been contributed by Utah. This 308includes improved ELF support, which I've started adapting for SPARC Solaris 3092.x. Integration isn't completely, so it probably won't work. 310 311HP9000/300 support, donated by HP, has been merged in. 312 313Ian Taylor has finished the MIPS ECOFF (Ultrix, Irix) support. 314 315Better error messages for unsupported configurations (e.g., hppa-hpux). 316 317Test suite framework is starting to become reasonable. 318 319---------------------------------------------------------------- 320 321Changes in 2.0: 322 323Mostly bug fixes. 324 325Some more merging of BFD and ELF code, but ELF still doesn't work. 326 327---------------------------------------------------------------- 328 329Changes in 1.94: 330 331BFD merge is partly done. Adventurous souls may try giving configure the 332"--with-bfd-assembler" option. Currently, ELF format requires it, a.out format 333accepts it; SPARC CPU accepts it. It's the default only for OS "elf" or 334"solaris". (ELF isn't really supported yet. It needs work. I've got some 335code from Utah for HP-PA ELF, and from DG for m88k ELF, but they're not fully 336merged yet.) 337 338The 68K opcode table has been split in half. It should now compile under gcc 339without consuming ridiculous amounts of memory. 340 341A couple data structures have been reduced in size. This should result in 342saving a little bit of space at runtime. 343 344Support for MIPS, from OSF and Ralph Campbell, has been merged in. The OSF 345code provided ROSE format support, which I haven't merged in yet. (I can make 346it available, if anyone wants to try it out.) Ralph's code, for BSD 4.4, 347supports a.out format. We don't have ECOFF support in just yet; it's coming. 348 349Support for the Hitachi H8/500 has been added. 350 351VMS host and target support should be working now, thanks chiefly to Eric 352Youngdale. 353 354---------------------------------------------------------------- 355 356Changes in 1.93.01: 357 358For m68k, support for more processors has been added: 68040, CPU32, 68851. 359 360For i386, .align is now power-of-two; was number-of-bytes. 361 362For m68k, "%" is now accepted before register names. For COFF format, which 363doesn't use underscore prefixes for C labels, it is required, so variable "a0" 364can be distinguished from the register. 365 366Last public release was 1.38. Lots of configuration changes since then, lots 367of new CPUs and formats, lots of bugs fixed. 368 369 370Local variables: 371fill-column: 79 372End: 373